Narrative Identity and Moral Identity

A Practical Perspective

Kim Atkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9781135912116
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

This book is part of the growing field of practical approaches to philosophical questions relating to identity, agency and ethics--approaches which work across continental and analytical traditions and which Atkins justifies through an explication of how the structures of human embodiment necessitate a narrative model of selfhood, understanding, and ethics.

1
Locke, Hume, and Kant on Selfhood

There are three key historical figures whose work remains central to philosophical conceptions of personal identity and selfhood: Locke, Hume, and Kant. Different aspects of their work have come and gone from popular favour over the years, but the motivating concerns of these three philosophers, as well as their distinctive approaches, continue to animate philosophical debates, for example, in the roles given to memory, imagination, and reason in both personal identity and morality. The earliest philosophical accounts of personal identity have been closely linked to moral identity. From early modern philosophers through to twentieth-century existentialists and since, conceptions of self and moral identity have gone hand in hand, typically by linking concepts of the soul or the will to reason, freedom, obligation, and culpability.¹ Perhaps the most significant figure in this respect is Locke. Commentators on Locke’s account of personal identity have tended, however, to emphasize metaphysical questions of continuity in consciousness to the neglect of the moral concerns that were so important to Locke—concerns about responsibility, divine judgment, and punishment. There are notable exceptions, however, such as Marya Schechtman, who argues that moral concerns underpin the value philosophers have attached to the psychological approach to personal identity.² In this chapter, by attending to the importance of the first-personal perspective for Locke, Hume, and Kant, we will commence our path from personal to moral identity.

LOCKE

Although Locke is known as an empiricist, his account of personal identity is driven by significant nonempirical religious and moral concerns.³ He rejected a speculative philosophy of the self, not from reasons of the thoroughgoing materialism that we find later in Hume, but from a desire to reconcile his philosophical views with his religious commitments. By focusing on the practical problem of how a person remains the same over time, rather than on the metaphysical problem of determining the sameness of the soul, Locke provides an account in which persons survive bodily death and can be held responsible for their thoughts and actions before God. In short, his account is compatible with ideas of resurrection and divine judgment (Martin, 45). Locke’s account allowed him to sidestep a difficult related problem for a soul-based theory of personal identity, namely, the problem of how a thinking thing could exist where no thinking is going on, for example, in instances of forgetting or sleeping. While such interruptions present difficulties for ascertaining the continued presence of the soul, they present much less of a problem for determining whether or not a person is the ‘same consciousness.’

For Locke, an object has the same identity when it is identical to itself: “when the ideas it is attributed to vary not at all from what they were that moment wherein we consider their former existence, and to which we compare the present. For we never finding, nor conceiving it possible, that two things of the same kind should exist in the same place, at the same time.”⁴ Locke devised three different criteria to satisfy this definition of identity with reference to substances, animals and vegetables, and persons. His criterion for identity of a substance (including an immaterial substance such as a soul) stipulates that the substance admit of no change in size or shape or mass. By contrast, a living thing such as a plant or animal, which does change its size, shape, mass, and even its substance, retains identity by retaining the same organization of its parts, or, as Locke puts it, by “participation in the same continued life” (§6). For example, I can trim and lop a tree so that sometimes it is tall, sometimes it is short, sometimes it has leaves, and other times it has none, yet it is still considered the same tree. We routinely endow trees, cats, and other living beings with a single life.

The situation of the identity of a person is rather more complex. Locke points out that when we ask about a person’s identity, we typically ask if this “man” is the same “man” as he was in the past. However, for Locke a man (more exactly, a human being) is distinct from a person. A man is a rational being shaped and joined to a body (§§7, 8), but a person is a consciousness, and personal identity consists in being the same consciousness. Locke defines a person as a

thinking intelligent being that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places; which it does only by that consciousness which is inseparable from thinking, and, as it seems to me, essential to it: it being impossible for anyone to perceive without perceiving that he does perceive. When we see, hear, smell, taste, feel, meditate, or will anything, we know that we do so. Thus it is always as to our present sensations and perceptions: and by this every one is to himself that which he calls a self. (§9)

Locke’s conception of consciousness is complex, encompassing affective and evaluative components. He writes that “the limbs of his body are to everyone a part of himself; he sympathises and is concerned for them” (§11); that everyone is concerned for his happiness and misery (§18); that a self is “sensible, or conscious of pleasure and pain, capable of happiness and misery, and so is concerned for it self, as far as that consciousness extends” (§17); that a person “is concerned and accountable; owns and imputes to itself past actions” (§26).

Locke defends his view by reference to the usage of this definition of ‘person’ in commonplace language, social practices, and institutions. The distinction between a man and a person, he claims, is recognised in courts of law, which do not impute the past actions of an insane man to the same man, now sane, but, rather, regard the same man as two distinct persons (§20). The distinction is based upon the discontinuity between the two consciousnesses. This distinction tends to be obscured by the commonplace use of the word ‘I’ to refer to the same man. Furthermore, Locke argued that this distinction underpinned religious beliefs such that the only way we could reasonably think “the infant Socrates the same man with Socrates after the resurrection” would be if we made just this distinction (§21). In other words, language use, common knowledge, and the social practices premised upon them bear out the distinction between ‘man’ and ‘person.’ From this practical, discursive orientation, Locke describes ‘person’ as a term used for the purposes of “appropriating actions and merit” (§26).

Locke’s emphasis on the reflexive character of consciousness posits a person as the subject of a temporally extended consciousness, the continuity of which is (partly) constituted in the first person by one’s taking oneself to be the same self as one’s past self. One takes oneself to be the same self by owning and imputing to oneself one’s past thoughts and actions. The concept of appropriation links personal identity to moral identity by linking psychology and morality in the active process of imputation and accountability. (I will take this point up in more detail in Chapters 4 and 5.) Perhaps oddly, Locke thought that one could not be held responsible for one’s past actions if one had no recollection of having carried out those actions. On Locke’s view, such actions are properly imputed to some other unknown person who will, like everyone else, have to stand before God on judgment day. This consolation is not so reassuring from another perspective. Perhaps the real danger on this account is a situation where one ‘remembers’ (with all the attendant reactive attitudes) doing something evil which, in fact, one did not do. This phenomenon is common enough among young children, who routinely attribute their parents’ unhappiness to their (the children’s) actions. Locke is aware of this kind of possibility, and so contends that God would not let this happen (§13).

Locke has, in the main, been interpreted (and then criticised) as arguing that personal identity consists in memory. Clearly, the imputation and appropriation of past actions requires memory. However, there are two reasons why memory is insufficient to do the job of personal identity as Locke describes it. First, while memory is vital to the unity of consciousness over time, it is inadequate to account for the unity of consciousness at a time. It is the reflexive nature of consciousness that grounds this latter unity for Locke (Martin, 43). For Locke, having perceptions necessitates the subject’s awareness of them, and it is the subject’s reflective awareness of them that unifies consciousness at a time. Kant would later describe this unity as “apperceptive.”⁵ Second, when one claims to have had an experience (to have a memory), one must be able to remember oneself actually undergoing the experience, and not simply have representative images of the experience; one has to remember ‘from the inside.’ This is precisely how fact is often separated from fiction in courts of law. Under cross-examination a witness may give evidence that is contrary to the subjective experience the witness is claiming to have had. For example, a witness may remember the colour of a car or a person’s clothing that, while nevertheless correct, could not possibly have been perceived as that colour because of the lighting conditions at the time.

More than merely having memories, personal identity requires that one must be able to appropriate past actions to oneself as their same subject. As Locke’s comments on happiness and misery, pleasure and pain indicate, appropriation entails more than merely thinking that one is a certain person, or even thinking that one is concerned with that person’s past experiences; it entails that one is concerned in a certain kind of way with those experiences and actions (Martin, 53). Being concerned in the right way just is to have a concern for them from ‘the inside’ and to hold oneself accountable for them. Furthermore, such concern and accountability manifest in being united to one’s body through feelings relating to happiness and misery, for example, through guilt, remorse, pride, or joy.⁶ Remembering purely from the ‘outside’ will have a different affective profile from memories of lived experience. According to Locke, reflexive consciousness of one’s experiences and their appropriation to oneself within the same continued life constitutes one’s identity and, so, distinguishes the identities of persons.

Locke distinguishes his view from Descartes’s by arguing that even though identity resides in consciousness, we cannot infer from self-consciousness that the self is an unchanging mental substance. At no time do we ever have all of our consciousness—thoughts and memories—on view to us, and we suffer from forgetfulness and inaccurate recollection. More seriously, though, we go to sleep and lose consciousness of ourselves altogether. These interruptions to consciousness cast doubt on our ability to claim that self-consciousness is constituted by a single purely thinking thing (or thinking substance): “it is evident that immaterial thinking thing may sometimes part company with its past consciousness, and be restored to it again” (§23). Such movement of immaterial substance does not, however, cast doubt on whether or not one is the same person because “nothing but consciousness can unite remote experiences into the same person: the identity of substance will not do it; for whatever substance there is, however framed, without consciousness, there is no person: and a carcass may be a person, as well as any sort of substance be so, without consciousness” (§23).

An interruption to consciousness will not interrupt one’s personal identity so long as one can appropriate one’s earlier feelings, ideas, and actions ‘from the inside’; that is, so long as one “owns and imputes to itself its past actions, just upon the same ground and for the same reason as it does the present” (§26).

What really matters for personal identity is being the same consciousness from the first-personal perspective: constituting oneself through self-appropriation. As the activity of owning and imputing one’s thoughts and actions, personal identity, for Locke, is a practical concern, and so continuity in identity is agential continuity. Agential continuity is continuity of one’s sense of being the same agent of one’s past thoughts and actions, especially with respect to their accompanying feelings of happiness and misery (and their attendant reactive attitudes), but also with reference to the regard that others have for one’s actions (most notably, God’s divine judgment). Preoccupied with the metaphysics of memory connectedness, philosophers have tended to overlook these aspects of Locke’s account. As a result, Locke’s psychological self-constitution theory has come to be widely regarded as merely a psychological continuity theory. However, a long overdue redress exists in Marya Schechtman’s narrative self-constitu-tion view, to which I will return in Chapter 4.

HUME

David Hume was deeply influenced by Locke’s empiricism, but, unlike Locke, was renowned for the strength of his atheistic convictions. It is hardly surprising then that his account of personal identity constitutes a direct attack on the idea that the self is the soul or a spiritual entity—or indeed, any entity at all. The centrepiece of Hume’s theory is his account of psychological association, which he uses to great effect against the thenpopular “substrate” view of the self.⁷

Being an empiricist and a sceptic, Hume insists that the only basis for knowledge of any thing, including a thinking thing, can be an impression and perception of it. Proof of the empirical basis of knowledge can be demonstrated by noting that “if it happen from a defect of the organ, that a man is not susceptible of any species of sensation, we always find that he is as little susceptible of the correspondent idea. A blind man can form no notion of colours, a deaf man of sounds.”⁸ For Hume, all ideas stem from perceptions of which there are two types: impressions and ideas. Impressions are “lively perceptions” and include such things as sensation, movement, and even love and hate.⁹ Ideas are produced by our reflections upon those impressions, which form “calm perceptions.” The calmness induced by reflection is also a feature of Hume’s moral philosophy, expressed in the idea that morality concerns the sentiments of an impartial observer.

The totality of human thought, says Hume, “amounts to no more than the faculty of compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing the materials afforded us by the senses and experience” (Inquiry, 34). Here Hume adopts the Lockean view that perceptions are atomistic: “They are, therefore, distinguishable, and separable, and may be conceived as separately existent, and may exist separately, without any contradiction or absurdity.”¹⁰ Perceptions, being distinct and separable existences, are associated in the mind by the imagination to form complex thoughts and experiences. Without some principle of association such as imagination affords, our distinct perceptions would remain independent and indifferent to one another, and so, representations and knowledge would never arise.

For Hume, the systematicity of imagination’s powers of association gives to perception a regularity that we mistakenly attribute to objects in the external world. This attribution is mistaken because all we can have direct...

Table of contents

• Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Locke, Hume, and Kant on Selfhood
• 2 The Ambiguity of Embodiment
• 3 Intersubjectivity and the Second-Personal Perspective
• 4 The Embodied Self and Narrative Identity
• 5 Narrative Identity and the Ethical Perspective
• 6 Practical Wisdom and Moral Exceptionality
• 7 Autonomy Competency and Narrative Competency
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index